Looney Labs Fluxx Mailing list Archive

Re: [Fluxx] Volity Fluxx 3.1 online

  • FromDoug Orleans <dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx>
  • DateTue, 16 May 2006 17:54:08 -0400
S Mattison writes:
 > On 5/15/06, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
 > > > The Bot must take time and pretend to think of it's strategy, like a
 > > > human opponent would. I've had this debate before, whist thinking of
 > > > ways to implement realistic AI. There HAS to be a wait time, or
 > > > otherwise the judges will realize that your AI is simply a chat-bot,
 > > > because it responds instantly.
 > > But we have no intention of fooling people into thinking that the bots are
 > > humans.
 > 
 > True. But if you don't treat them as humans, you have the classic
 > "Puzzle Pirates Foraging Imbalance". [...] What this all means is
 > that the Computer is a Magical Person whom is allowed to break all
 > the rules.

To be clear, the Volity Fluxx referee treats all players equally,
whether they be humans, bots spawned from the Volity Fluxx parlor, or
"ronin" bots implemented by some third party.  Zarf's point was just
that the Volity Fluxx bots don't pretend to be human *to other
players*, and Gamut (the standard Volity client) doesn't present them
as humans either-- the only way you'll even encounter a bot is with
the "Request bot" menu choice, and they show up with robot-head icons
in the game table's roster panel.

Of course, since Volity is an open system, it's possible for someone
to implement a game referee that gives special privileges to bots.
But I think that would be frowned upon.  More precisely, when the
Volity reputation system comes online, players could vote on whether
they think any particular referee is fair or not (or whether it
matters).  So the system should be self-correcting in that respect.

 > > But a good fast-forward control, combined with a player preference to
 > > control how fast changes tick in, should alleviate that.
 > 
 > That still doesn't address "pseudo lag", where a player who wants to
 > see is forced to rewind, and find a spot that he remembers the game
 > looking like...

I think Zarf's proposal was to have the UI present the card play to
the user in slo-mo by default (with configurable speed), and force the
player to fast-forward if he doesn't want to watch what happened, rather
than to rewind if he does.  So I think you're both in agreement.

 > We could always solve this by saying that there is no real strategy to
 > the game of fluxx, and the bot should always pick a card at random and
 > play after 1.5 seconds. ;)

The Volity Fluxx bots do play cards at random, but it's quite easy to
beat them about 80% of the time in one-on-one play.  So there is
certainly a modicum of strategy to Fluxx.

--dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx